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SpinQuant: LLM quantization with learned rotations

Canonical reference. 80% of citing Pith papers cite this work as background.

49 Pith papers citing it
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abstract

Post-training quantization (PTQ) techniques applied to weights, activations, and the KV cache greatly reduce memory usage, latency, and power consumption of Large Language Models (LLMs), but may lead to large quantization errors when outliers are present. Rotating activation or weight matrices helps remove outliers and benefits quantization. In this work, we identify a collection of applicable rotation parameterizations that lead to identical outputs in full-precision Transformer architectures while enhancing quantization accuracy. In addition, we find that some random rotations lead to much better quantization than others, with an up to 13 points difference in downstream zero-shot reasoning performance. As a result, we propose SpinQuant, a novel approach that incorporates learned rotation matrices for optimal quantized network accuracy. With 4-bit quantization of weight, activation, and KV-cache, SpinQuant narrows the accuracy gap on zero-shot reasoning tasks with full precision to merely 2.9 points on the LLaMA-2 7B model, surpassing LLM-QAT by 19.1 points and SmoothQuant by 25.0 points. Furthermore, SpinQuant also outperforms concurrent work QuaRot, which applies random rotations to remove outliers. In particular, for LLaMA-3 8B models that are hard to quantize, SpinQuant reduces the gap to full precision by up to 45.1% relative to QuaRot. Code is available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/SpinQuant.

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representative citing papers

Theory-optimal Quantization Based on Flatness

cs.LG · 2026-05-11 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

The paper introduces the Flatness metric, derives a theory-optimal quantization solution, and presents BDQ that uses bidirectional diagonal transformations to reduce outlier impact, achieving under 1% drop at W4A4 on LLaMA-3-8B.

OSAQ: Outlier Self-Absorption for Accurate Low-bit LLM Quantization

cs.LG · 2026-05-06 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0 · 2 refs

OSAQ suppresses weight outliers in LLMs via a closed-form additive transformation from the Hessian's stable null space, improving 2-bit quantization perplexity by over 40% versus vanilla GPTQ with no inference overhead.

QuantClaw: Precision Where It Matters for OpenClaw

cs.AI · 2026-04-24 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

QuantClaw dynamically routes precision in agent workflows to cut cost by up to 21.4% and latency by 15.7% while keeping or improving task performance.

MCAP: Deployment-Time Layer Profiling for Memory-Constrained LLM Inference

cs.LG · 2026-04-22 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

MCAP uses load-time Monte Carlo profiling to estimate layer importance, enabling dynamic quantization (W4A8 vs W4A16) and memory tiering (GPU/RAM/SSD) that delivers 1.5-1.8x higher decode throughput than llama-cpp Q4_0 on NVIDIA T4 while fitting models into previously infeasible memory budgets.

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Showing 49 of 49 citing papers.